Artist’s statement

My work engages with found objects, scrap wood and wire. Mostly I pick things up in alleys and side streets, after they’ve been lost awhile. These human artifacts generally start out quite uniform, commodities manufactured deliberately to twin their assembly-line brethren. But abandonment and exposure lay a life on a thing, impose scars, stains, crimps. A distinct aesthetic existence, emergent through damage.

I’m drawn to the hard formal constraints of the chaotic and violent: embracing the aesthetic consequences of forces we cannot hope to control. Metal and wood are especially susceptible to this process of individuation-through-hard-times, and mostly they’re what catch my eye. In the studio I combine them, deploy the binding spell of wire, the occasional assertion of paint.